Inter-annual monitoring improves diversity estimation of tropical butterfly assemblages

Monitoring programs for diverse tropical butterfly assemblages are scarce and temporal diversity patterns in these assemblages are poorly understood. We adopted an additive partitioning approach to determine how temporal butterfly species richness was structured at the levels of days, months, and years in five tropical/subtropical sites across three continents covering up to nine years of monitoring. We found that observed butterfly richness was not uniformly distributed across temporal extents. Butterfly species composition differed across months and years, potentially accounting for the fact that temporal butterfly species richness contributed a high proportion to total species richness. We further examined how species richness of common and uncommon species (> and <0.5 percent of total abundance, respectively) were structured across temporal extents. The results showed that the common species relative contribution to total species richness was higher at lower-temporal levels, w...